On falling in love with a potential killer

My love affair with the drug otherwise known as ‘coffee’ has something of the inevitable about it; like most relationships people have with suspected killers I know it’s not good for me but I’m irresistibly compelled to keep on coming back for more.  Basically I love the stuff, which as I’m an aspiring writer is probably a good thing.  I’ve got a Jewish friend who doesn’t like smoked salmon and so all her Jewish family and friends proclaim that she “isn’t really Jewish”.   It’s the same thing with coffee and writing, so my success must be guaranteed, surely?

Coffee seems to be synonymous with work and productivity – or at least, a chat over a coffee is viewed as more productive than a chat over a cuppa, which you’d assume as more of a therapeutic chat.   The evidence of that is clear in my office, where people’s diaries are littered with “coffee catch-ups” even if they don’t actually drink the stuff.    I can’t start the day without my morning Americano (black and sludgy, as it should be) and as I drink it I feel a potent surge of optimism about the day ahead that is rarely matched by its actual events.  Coffee, for me, inspires potential.  Coffee was partly responsible for the productivity of the Industrial Revolution back in the day, as workers previous to that period tended to drink gin as a pick-me-up instead (this is one of those ‘fascinating’ facts I regale people in the office with from time to time, at which they feign general interest and enlightenment).

The media report its dubious findings on coffee sporadically, in the manner of a long-term schizophrenic everybody's stopped listening to.  A little while ago I read that three cups of coffee a day staved off Alzheimer’s; a week later I read that it can also cause heart attacks (what a dilemma, eh?)  Then last week I read that “3 or more cups of coffee a day can cause death in the under-55s”  in a seemingly unsubstantiated article.  Regardless, we coffee drinkers don’t care.  If anything it gives a sexy, scary edge to our drink of choice that’s utterly conducive to its “hard man” reputation of the soft drink world.   Before long even James Bond will have abandoned his Martini in favour of a “black coffee… ground, not instant”.